Brad Lendon
A one-year contract to live and work in China, flying, repairing and making airplanes. Pay is as much as $16,725 a month with 30 days off a year. Housing is included, and you’ll get an extra $700 a month for food. And there’s an extra $11,000 for every Japanese airplane you destroy – no limit.
That’s the deal – in inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars – that a few hundred Americans took in 1941 to become the heroes, and some would even say the saviors, of China.
Those American pilots, mechanics and support personnel became members of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), later known as the Flying Tigers.
The group’s warplanes featured the gaping, tooth-filled mouth of a shark on their nose, a fearsome symbol still used by some US military aircraft to this day.
The symbolic fierceness was backed up by AVG pilots in combat. The Flying Tigers are credited with destroying as many as 497 Japanese planes while losing only 73.
Today, despite US-China tensions, those American mercenaries are still revered in China.
“China always remembers the contribution and sacrifice made to it by the United States and the American people during the World War II,” says an entry on the Flying Tigers memorial page of China’s state-run newspaper People’s Daily Online.
The bond is such that the daughter and granddaughter of the Flying Tigers’ founder are among the few Americans invited to Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing commemorating the end of World War II.
The formation of the Flying Tigers
In the late 1930s, China had been invaded by the armies of Imperial Japan and was struggling to withstand its better equipped and unified foe. Japan was virtually unopposed in the air, able to bomb Chinese cities at will.
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